ALC/1 - Personal

This includes details of material relating to Archie Cochrane’s family, his family tree, his education, his life at Rhoose Farm House, Cardiff, together with a selection of photographs ranging in date from the 1920s to the 1980s.

ALC/2 - Spain and World War II

Chiefly material relating to Archie Cochrane’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. It includes typescript poetry written by Archie Cochrane when held as a prisoner of war - later published as "Poems from Prison" (Cochrane A.L. [Chepstow] C.P. Healey, 1974), records of sickness levels in the PoW camps and a draft of "Sickness in Salonica: my first, worst, and most successful clinical trial" (BMJ 1984; 289: 1726-7).

Archie (in uniform on the right) in Granen, Spain (1936) while serving with the Spanish Medical Aid Committee's Field Ambulance Unit in support of the International Brigade. (Picture: Reproduced by kind permission of BMJ Books from "One Man's Medicine" Cochrane A.L., Blythe M. 1989 BMJ.)

ALC/3 -Pneumoconiosis Research Unit (PRU)

This includes PRU papers and reprints, questionnaires completed by miners during the Rhondda Fach Surveys, plus photographs of publicity posters produced to advertise clinics and lectures held both in the Rhondda and further afield in the USA.

ALC/4 -Epidemiology Unit

Chiefly material relating to the Rhondda Fach Scheme follow-up studies, including both handwritten and typescript drafts of papers.

Archie Cochrane explaining progressive fibrosis to one of the miners at Ferndale Colliery during the first Rhondda Fach Survey. (Picture: Crown copyright. From Archie Cochrane's autobiography "One Man's Medicine". Reproduced with permission of the Controller of HMSO and Queen's Printer for Scotland.)

ALC/5 - Health Services Research

This section includes a copy of the typescript text of Effectiveness and Efficiency, a file of correspondence to Archie Cochrane in response to its publication and press reviews of the book. There are also several papers written by Archie Cochrane relating to public health medicine and health services research.

ALC/6 - One Man’s Medicine

Archie Cochrane’s autobiography was published in 1989 and this section of the Archive includes handwritten and typescript drafts of various chapters from the book. There are also papers detailing colleagues’ responses to the drafts of the autobiography.

ALC/9 - Miscellaneous

The final section of the Archive includes a variety of items of a more personal nature, e.g., his self-written obituary, collections of photographs of Archie Cochrane and a copy of his obituary from The Times. A list of MRC Epidemiology Unit publications is also included.